Jake Tapper: CNN has obtained an e-mail sent by a top aide to President Barack Obama about White House reaction to the deadly attack last September 11 on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that apparently differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.

The actual e-mail from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House was primarily concerned with the State Department’s desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.

…. Whoever provided those accounts seemingly invented the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed. While Nuland, particularly, had expressed a desire to remove mentions of specific terrorist groups and CIA warnings about the increasingly dangerous assignment, Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his e-mail on the State Department’s concerns.

Media Matters: ABC News is now claiming that its Benghazi “exclusive” was based on summaries of emails between administration aides, not the emails themselves – an assertion belied by their earlier reports.

CNN’s Jake Tapper reported on May 14 that he had obtained an email sent by White House aide Ben Rhodes that “differs from how sources inaccurately quoted and paraphrased it in previous accounts to different media organizations,” including ABC’s Karl….

…. ABC News has responded by claiming their original reporting was based on summaries of the emails, not the emails themselves …. But ABC News and Karl himself have repeatedly suggested he had obtained the actual emails, not summaries of emails from Rhodes and others in the administration.

Greg Sargent: …. as Tapper puts it: “Whoever provided those quotes and paraphrases did so inaccurately, seemingly inventing the notion that Rhodes wanted the concerns of the State Department specifically addressed …. Rhodes put no emphasis at all in his email on the State Department’s concerns.”

This would seem to do still more damage to the notion that there was any kind of cover up here …. if this report bears out, it weakens the underpinning of this supposed scandal considerably…..

…. Tapper concludes: “whoever leaked the inaccurate information earlier this month did so in a way that made it appear that the White House – specifically Rhodes – was more interested in the State Department’s concerns, and more focused on the talking points, that the email actually stated.”

So who provided this seemingly changed version of the email to ABC News?

TPM: … [Jon] Karl says in a new piece that he asked his source to explain the discrepancy and got this response …

I asked my original source today to explain the different wording on the Ben Rhodes e-mail, and the fact that the words “State Department” were not included in the e-mail provided to CNN’s Tapper.

This was my source’s response, via e-mail: “WH reply was after a long chain of email about State Dept concerns. So when WH emailer says, take into account all equities, he is talking about the State equities, since that is what the email chain was about.”

I guarantee you Karl had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach when he saw that explanation. Because that explanation by reference to earlier comments in the thread is pretty weak. Karl’s follow on piece is entitled “More Details on Benghazi Talking Points Emerge” but the substance is, ‘How the Story Changes When I Realize the Notes I Was Using Weren’t Reliable.’ The answer here is that Karl pretty clearly got burned by his source. But he at least seriously singed himself by making it really, really look like he was looking at the emails themselves when he wasn’t.

Steve Benen: …. So, let me get this straight. Someone leaked misleading information to ABC and the Weekly Standard, they ran it, other news organizations embraced it, we’ve had several days of “scandal” based on it, and the information wasn’t true?

…. we’re not dealing with a mistake, so much as we’re dealing with a political actor deliberately misrepresenting key details to journalists, who in turn misled other journalists, who in turn created a controversy where none existed.

… Republicans have spent quite a bit of time recently insisting there are important, unanswered questions surrounding the Benghazi story. I’ve got one: who misled ABC and the Weekly Standard as part of this effort to smear the White House?

KARL: …. my question to you is, do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through this Congress?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, if you put it that way, Jonathan, maybe I should just pack up and go home. Golly …. as Mark Twain said, you know, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point.

Well, Karl’s own juice just ran out – ABC need to announce his demise right now. He either doctored the email himself, or, more likely, used an email doctored by an opponent of the President for his ‘exclusive’ – either way…. astonishing.

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238 Responses to “The Day Jonathan Karl Ran Out Of Juice”

IRS scandal: Liberal and Conservative groups were targeted, Tea party groups just got it more cause they were all over the place and a new group emerging each second from Sheldon and Koch money. (2 days to crumble)

AP scandal: There were multiple interview done (500+) before District Attorney (read not holder) issued subpoena, oh and Holder was questioned as part of the investigation. (1 day to crumble)

Some of them are still mad and can’t accept that they are looking real foolish after all the demands for Eric Holder to be fired. I can tell you that the PL emoprog contingent is ENRAGED right now. I have proof of that.

F’em. They are always enraged about something or other. Tomorrow, it’ll be Burma. What happened in Burma, you say? Why let’s ask the republican machine for the next ‘scandal’ and then everybody freak out. So over it all.

unfortunately so many of my “liberal” friends (all white mind you) were repeating that talk yesterday on facebook, and comparing this to richard nixon, so “mission accomplished for the billionaires who own all the media. that’s why what they do is so harmful. republicans are totally gone off the rails, and liberal support is allowing itself to be divided and conquered by their games. these new demographics in america cannot come fast enough! they are not so susceptible to these media-created games.

Just by looking at my TL, I sense that MSNBC (I have not watched them on TV) has been literally unhinged all day – someone’s going to slip and say the N- word if they’re not careful. They are this close to saying it. They have essentially replaced FOX News and it shows in their dwindling ratings. I’m not sure why Phil Griffin thought that being anti-Obama was a good model (business or otherwise) for his network. I guess Karma is paying them a visit, as she should.

I just emailed ABC News: ” Re Jonathan Karl’s stupidity: What happened to the ABC News of Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith? How the once mighty have fallen! You do know you’re a joke out here in the heartland?”
Jon Karl should be fired, along with the entire ABC News department!

So another pleasant surprise from the hospital today. First the acupuncture, then a music session, THEN they brought in dinner from a local bbq restaurant. Good stuff. Most I’ve eaten from them in a very long time. Actually had a salad instead of cold soggy veggies. Yum.

So glad to hear you enjoyed your meal today. And, I just want you to know that you are on my prayer list as of today. I am late learning about your illness.

But, you are one tough cookie; in spite of all you write n to TOD and inspire all the rest of us. I love reading what you write, even when it’s not going so well with you. Your grat spirit shines through.

Sadly, because there’s more profit (at least monetarily) in doing the opposite. No one has figured out a way to translate the costs into terms that will cause the people with the purse strings to take notice and see that changing things will be for their own benefit.

The MSM is not just lazy. They deliberately bury any news that could possibly be construed as positive for PBO. Yet they go out of their way and literally work over-time spinning stuff and digging up any trash that could be reported as “negative” or “scandalous” for PBO

LIberal Media My Arse……….They will find excuses for TBGOPers and justify their behavior. But to report even on pres Obama’s trips, events, commencements, etc are questioned and dissected. His Skeet shooting comments were questioned even when a photo was released. But a gulf outing with Tiger Woods was a 3-6 days story,

6 words (with one stretched to make the note seem longer?) Wow! Little GeorgieB had more skills that I had thought. Wonder who told him you were being rude though? I see no evidence to suggest he would have been able to figure that out by himself.

Ambassador Stevens twice said no to military offers of more security, U.S. officials say

In the month before attackers stormed U.S. facilities in Benghazi and killed four Americans, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens twice turned down offers of security assistance made by the senior U.S. military official in the region in response to concerns that Stevens had raised in a still secret memorandum, two government officials told McClatchy.

Ain’t it the truth! 🙂 I read what was supposed to be the official State Department (?) timeline. It recorded a request from Ambassador Stevens for 5 security personnel. Then I read and email that supposedly came from Tripoli (Stevens) making the same request. 2 security personnel traveled with him and there were already 3 at the annex. In a later email, he said that would be adequate.

This whole argument is so silly to me. If one has chaos breaking our in half a dozen places and you have to figure out where to send resources, I would think a location with 2 dozen CIA members would be at the bottom of the list.

If I rember correctly, CBS fired Dan Rather and somebody else for supposedly using false documents to question George Bush’s military record. I think ABC should do the same to Jonathan Karl for relying on doctored e-mails to impugn the integrity of the President. We also need an investigation to find out the source (s) of the falsfied e-mail that Karl based his sensationalist report on.

Yes, CBS fired Dan Rather, but as was later learned, Dan Rather was right, which no one, least of all the Bushes wanted made public. That was political arm twisting at its most obvious…..at least to us. Also, a journalist named Mary Mapes was also shunned because she worked with Dan Rather to investigate that situation. GWB was a draft dodger in the National Guard, and didn’t even fulfill his National Guard obligations. He was just a spoiled little rich boy who never worked a day in his life, and certainly didn’t work a day when he was appointed president!

Just thinking…….if MSNBC still had Donahue and Olbermann, they might be making money and have a large audience. You didn’t have to agree with everything they said, to know they were being honest. Olbermann wrote all his own stuff, Donahue could interview like no one else…..the management and owners are wusses. Who’s going to watch the right/center pablum on MSNBC now?????

Unfortunately it was not just the GOP calling on Holder to resign – a significant segment of the left media, MSNBC, Jon Stewart, etc were all singing for Holder’s head. I think it’s time that we begin to acknowledge that this hatred of and hostility towards our President extends far beyond the GOP.

People looking for an Obama scandal, this one spying on the AP is the first legit one.

That’s true, however, these individuals do not self-identify or seen by others as being part of the GOP, nor do they work for FOX news. They are usually seen either on MSNBC, or in the blogosphere where people think of them as “liberals” even though you and I know know differently about their underlying orientation.

Wouldn’t worry about Moulitsas, an Obama-basher for as long as I can remember – don’t think he ever quite left his GOP roots. But being a fake progressive can be profitable, as my beloved Cenk has proved.

Greenwald? He’s as left as Newt Gingrich. The CATO/Koch boy is a worthless piece of shit.

Shuster? A comedy show.

Jon Stewart? A juvenile smart ass – have long since grown tired of his back-of-the-class sneering at anyone and everything, but hopefully he’ll grow up one day.

But they are not seen as part of the GOP nor do they identify that way, and some of them have been thought of as quite “liberal”

In general Eric Holder is not appreciated by the “liberal left” and “liberal MSM” for some reason, and I think it partly has to do with the fact that he didn’t prioritize their pet issues of prosecuting Bush or going after the banks, and instead worked on voters rights, medicare fraud, mortgage fraud, police brutality, etc, things that affect the poor, working class, middleclass and disenfranchised, not concerns of the wealthy limousine liberals. Of course the racial element is also an important factor.

What a treat to come here today! I’ve been grading papers all week-end – only have 25 more to go. And I had a funeral to go to. When I got back home I turned on Hardball – and turned it right back off again. I’ve decided on a summer without tv news. Good-bye to MSNBC. I liked some of the evening programs, but I’ve had it. Then I come here and read highlights about things the media opinionators don’t even mention. So now I’m watching a Lewis and Clark documentary on Netflix (love historical documentaries!), quickly perusing TOD, and now about to return to the papers.

My good and fun news—-youngest daughter is expecting her 1st baby——and they found out today “what kind” (as mr. dotster amusingly put it). They are going to have a sweet little girl babe—–(no boy parts detected)—–and this is funny—-my daughter swears the wee thing (little bigger than an avocado) was waving at her mom and dad during the ultrasound. I bought it.

Okay, everybody jump on me. I don’t like the President’s statement. The IRS did their job. They target people who have home offices, certain contributions, particular investment. They should have targeted all of those organizations on the left and right and turned down every one of them. The scandal is that they changed the criteria to match the activities of the Tea Party.

I know what you’re saying FayPax, but I think the statement alludes to what you said: “The scandal is that they changed the criteria to match the activities of the Tea Party.”

Here:

I have now had the opportunity to review the Treasury Department watchdog’s report on its investigation of IRS personnel who improperly targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. And the report’s findings are intolerable and inexcusable. The federal government must conduct itself in a way that’s worthy of the public’s trust, and that’s especially true for the IRS. The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity. This report shows that some of its employees failed that test.

I’ve directed Secretary Lew to hold those responsible for these failures accountable, and to make sure that each of the Inspector General’s recommendations are implemented quickly, so that such conduct never happens again. But regardless of how this conduct was allowed to take place, the bottom line is, it was wrong. Public service is a solemn privilege. I expect everyone who serves in the federal government to hold themselves to the highest ethical and moral standards. So do the American people. And as President, I intend to make sure our public servants live up to those standards every day.

—-

To be honest, I think they should have been targeting these groups, but it’s also crucial that standards don’t drop to IRS levels under Bush when only liberal groups were targeted. Although, as we’ve read, the vast majority of groups that appeared in last few years were Tea Party types, which largely accounts for them topping the ‘target’ list.

They all suffer for what I call the “Woodward syndrome”. They want to become the next Bob Woodward; they want to become a celebrity because they exposed the scandal of the decade, of the century. It’s about their career. No question journalists have to scrutinize the actions of politicians; but the type of witch hunts, faux scandals we’ve seen in the last few years is NOT journalism. They’ll have to realize one thing: they haven’t found big scandals because this president and his cabinet have INTEGRITY.

If they want real scandal, they’ll have to wait for the next republican administration. We usually have big, REAL ones when a republican holds the presidency. Watergate, Iran-Contra, Abu Ghraib, the lies going into Iraq, politicization of the Justice department, and on and on… (Of course the problem is that journalists always hesitate to attack a republican president because they’re afraid of getting their republican bosses unhappy…)

Former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said Tuesday that it was “entirely legitimate” for the Internal Revenue Service to target conservative groups for increased scrutiny, calling the tea party the “Taliban wing of American politics.”

“I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the tea party,” Bond said during an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts. “Here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who’ve tried as best as they can to harm President Obama in every way.”

In 2004, the civil rights group was audited by the IRS in a move Bond criticized at the time as “an attempt to silence the NAACP.”

“They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” he said in 2004. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”

During the Tuesday interview, Bond denied that there was any parallel between the IRS’ latest scandal and the NAACP audit.

What Randhi Rhoades and AG Holder said today, makes it pretty clear it was someone with high enough access to those emails (enough to know what they said, and to edit them and mislead), and high enough CIA intel that they knew about the undercover op we had inside AQ in Tripoli.

There is a mole, most likely paid by the GOP, and it’s all going to blow up in their faces.

WOW!!! What a day, the I.R.S, Benghazi, and some emails. It’s barely past 9 p.m. and President Obama kicked ass and in on his way to tuck Michelle in. I miss the good old days when a scandal lasted more than twenty-four hours.

A veteran journalist’s acidically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.

In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle…. But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.

With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.

With Idiot America, Pierce’s thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

Thank goodness that this too will pass. Trouble don’t last always (as the song goes). I think I’ve had it up to my hairline with these “scandals”. Just hope President Obama stays focus on moving the country forward and ignores haters on the left and right.

He will stat focus pkayden, remember what FLOTUS said about things like this, I can’t remember her exact words but she said something like when all the people around is pulling their hair our with worry, and being all concern, POTUS is charm, he keeps his eye on the ball. She said something like that, but what she said let’s me know that POTUS will be just fine. We have to keep him, FLOTUS, and the girls in our prayers.

UPDATE, 9 p.m.: Lew said in a separate statement that he is “deeply troubled” by the findings.

“While the Inspector General found no evidence that any individual or organization outside the IRS influenced the decision to use these criteria, these actions were inappropriate and did not reflect the high standards which I expect and the public deserves,” he said. “Like the American people, I have zero tolerance for any action that could undermine public confidence in the impartial and non-partisan administration of the tax code.”

Lew didn’t say much about the consequences, but he did promise to pursue those who engaged in misconduct. “I strongly agree with the president about the need for accountability at the IRS, and I expect the IRS to implement the Inspector General’s recommendations without delay,” he said.